Khan is the founder of Khan Academy, a website which has gotten a lot of attention for offering free online video lectures about a variety of subjects. It started as a one-man operation on a no-budget and has grown and obtained major funding from places like The Gates Foundation.

This book takes his ideas much wider to how he sees the future of education. It builds off what he set out to do with Khan Academy. He is really talking School 2.0 (versus University 2.0) since he is intent on changing elementary and secondary schools more than higher education.

There is a chapter on “What College Could Be Like.” What does that college look like? In brief, it's a place where students spend most of their time working on internships and mentored projects and not in classrooms. Not that traditional educational approaches are gone, but much of that is self-paced learning on the Khan Academy model.

He sees ungraded evening seminars. "Faculty" are mostly professionals who act as mentors and guides along with a some professors who still teach theory, concepts and the knowledge base. The entrepreneurs, inventors, and executives that he sees working with students are more like the adjuncts who often teach now in professional schools. The lecture-based course is either eliminated or greatly reduced in number.

Although MOOCs are not really part of the book, some issues that those courses need to address are part of his plan. For example, he thinks that colleges can separate the teaching from the credentialing. He does not see students being graded in the way we grade now. His vision is more about compiling a portfolio of their work and of their assessments from their professors and mentors. But students will still need to have their learning progress validated by some institution.